Skip to main content

Heart - Heart

Heart
After a string of somewhat lacklustre albums Heart reinvented themselves as mainstream rockers, got picked up by Capitol Records and dropped one of their biggest albums ever in 1985. The band employed outside writers on over half of the tracks including the rejected Toronto track "What About Love" that became the band's first big hit in years, and after that the hits kept coming  "These Dreams" which would go all the way to number one, along with "Never" and "Nothin' at All", and "If Looks Could Kill" which was pretty cool.

I wonder how much of this was right place, right time ... whatever the case Heart was back, and the album would sell over 600,000 in Canada, and over 5,000,000 in the States. Not bad considering their previous two records hadn't gone gold, and the band seemed to be done.

insert
Heart is one of those bands I never really gave much though to. When I was a kid I absolutely loved "Barracuda" and "Magic Man" and then I sort of fell off. I never bought any of their records ... although I did pick up Passionworks because I liked one song ... for the guitar solo. I can't remember the name of the song without looking. I've mentioned it before ... I tend to repeat myself after a while.

Listening to Heart now is kind of fun. I mean they were going for the mainstream, and boy howdy they weren't swimming against the current. The album was produced and engineered by Ron Nevison and the album absolutely shimmers.

more insert
The band was solid with Mark Andes on bass, Howard Leese on guitar, keys and mandolin, and Denny Carmassi on drums. In the smaller print synth whiz Peter Wolf played keys and was credited with "creative" input. From Heart to the Commodores he was doing his thing.

I suppose to the hardcore fans who'd been along since '75 this new sound a decade later must have seemed like the band was selling out. Sell out they did as the '85 self titled released outsold the band's first three classic albums combined.

Does that make this one better?

back cover
Absolutely not but it is pretty bloody good. It's funny as I'd just listened to Bad Animals a couple of months ago and for whatever reason (it may have been a lack of coffee) the album just didn't have any legs for me ... that day.

It's absolutely astounding to think this album is forty years old. Not everything has held up but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at how many of the songs I recognized and how good they sounded to these old ears. 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the 90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984 my (dearly departed, and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read just go back and skim it, I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off and on again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ...  It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gary Wright - The Light of Smiles

Gary Wright followed up his double platinum release The Dreamweaver in 1977 with The Light of Smiles . It must have been a surprise and a bit of a disappointment when the album didn't perform as well as hoped. It did chart as high as 23 on the Billboard top LP and Tape chart according to what I read on the wiki, but it must have been more of a spike than anything. As the album didn't seem to attain any certifications that I could see. Not that it matters, I've said it before, and I'll likely say it again (more than once) most of my favourite albums never really attained any significant commercial success.  I'd seen this album over the years, but that was about it. Gary Wright was Mr. Dreamweaver and I'm sure somehow it was worked into his epitaph when he passed away a couple of years ago. For me I was really curious about this one, lately I've been a sucker for finding albums that follow a big release. For Gary Wright he was flying high after The Dreamweave...
Post a Comment
Read more